Newsmakers

Heart Recipient Finds Herself Looking Up to Reagan

--Donna Ashlock, the 14-year-old California girl who received the heart of her friend and classmate, Felipe Garza, met President Reagan at the White House and said he was taller than she had expected. "I thought he was shorter," Donna said, shivering in front of microphones outside the White House after her brief Oval Office visit. She emerged from the meeting with two presents, one a jar of presidential jelly beans and the other a surprise from Nancy Reagan, which Donna had not opened. When asked how she would describe the meeting to her friends back home in Patterson, she said, "They missed out." Donna, on her first trip away from home since her surgery in January, is in Washington to serve as the Belle of the Ball at a St. Valentine's Day gala Friday for the benefit of the American Heart Assn. She was suffering from a terminal heart condition when Felipe died of a stroke Jan. 4. His parents honored Felipe's wish to give his heart to Donna.

--The sunny shores of Florida aren't the only place that Gov. Martha Layne Collins can go to work on her tan. The state of Kentucky purchased a $3,250 tanning bed that was installed in the governor's mansion, officials said.

--Actress Sally Field rode in an open limousine through a snowstorm in Cambridge, Mass., and was fitted with a bra adorned with propellers as she received the 1986 Woman of the Year award from Harvard's Hasty Pudding club. "This has been the most humiliating experience of my life," Field said during a ceremony in the Hasty Pudding Theatricals' Harvard Square building. Club President Leonard Dick and Vice President Ty Warren said they decided to give Field the bra fitted with silver and blue metallic propellers while pondering how she flew during the television series "The Flying Nun." Bundled in a black overcoat and a hot pink scarf and wedged between male Hasty Pudding players dressed as busty women, Field rode through a blizzard of snow and confetti during a quarter-mile parade through Harvard Square. Field received a gold "Pudding Pot," the traditional symbol given to winners of the annual award by the club, billed as the oldest dramatic organization in the country. Previous recipients include Cher, Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall, Elizabeth Taylor and Meryl Streep.